– Jennifer Porter hilariously looks at what Clean Reader actually does, and lists the word replacements (and notes, as Joanne does, that it scrubs references to female anatomy and changes them all to “bottom,” thus suggesting that Clean Reader is not-so-secretly a fan of anal sex).

(They have a book of mine — The Cormorant — for sale, which is ha ha ohhh, not actually awesome because that book is no longer for sale. It has changed publishers and will be republished by Simon & Schuster SAGA in April, so how exactly they’re selling that book is somewhat beyond me. They also have Kick-Ass Writer for sale, and at this point I’m pretty sure that any of my books run through their colonic cleansing process will cause whatever device is using it to catch fire and melt into a ball of sparking, smoking slag.)

For those saying that this doesn’t modify the file and isn’t illegal — well, maybe so. I’m not a lawyer. Lots of things are legal that I think jolly well shouldn’t be. For my mileage, that this modifies the reader’s experience is the same as modifying the book. Yes, the file of the book has meaning, but so does the content, and when you change the content or allow it to be changed, that concerns me.

Look at it this way:

Imagine that in the real world there existed a bookstore, and the clerk at this store will modify any book on the shelves and sell it to you. He’ll change words, characters, whatever. He makes money off the exchange. The book received is not the book you wrote.

Okay, your objection to that is — ahh, but this is the reader’s choice and it’s not one change but an entire host of permutational programmatic changes, so, okay.

Let’s change the story.

Imagine that in the online world (which is still real, by the way), there existed an online bookstore and the magical online robot at this store will modify any book on their digital shelves and sell it to you. The content of the book — whether technically changed or overlaid with changes — is marred. And not just with one set of changes but with a whole host of permutational possibilities — a finite set, however, of those possibilities, because a book contains only so many tsk-tsk naughty fuckbuckets and shitkittens within its pages, and so only so many changes are possible.

Maybe that sits okay with you.

It does not sit well with me.

The reader can take my books and do whatever he or she wants with them after sale. Read them backward, forward, upside-down, block out whole pages of text, draw dong doodles in all the margins, write phone numbers in the front, scratch out my name on the cover and write in theirs, use it as a butt plug for an elephant. The trick is, you then cannot go and sell that modification back to the consumer. Much as you are free to mod a game or download mods to a game — but you are not then able to sell/resell the game with that mod (or a host of potential mods embedded in or overlaid upon the code) in place.

And so, the battle against this silly, septic product continues. As the only profane thing here that I can see is what this app does to books and stories and history.

Just a sampling of the absurd delights! Change the words but don’t change any of the context or content for maximum whatthefuckery. (Because changing words doesn’t change what goes on inside the book. Just because you change the words fuck my asshole doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t still fuck my asshole — and the scene that ensues is likely very much about some kind of anal penetration with all the context and sexery remaining relatively explicit. Changing a few words does nothing except make explicit material goofy.)

Good times.

For my mileage, if you require action items:

You can email them at cleanreader@inktera.com and demand your books be taken off.

You can also talk to your publishers about keeping your books off of Clean Reader.

122 Comments

There is an argument that it violates copyright and according to App creators, since they are not modifying it, the reader is, then it doesn’t violate copyright. But I disagree.
man’s part = groin
woman’s birth canal = bottom

I write about vaginal sex. So this app will replace the words to make it into anal sex. That’s a significant change in my work, and the creators of the App allowed that to happen. If I wanted my characters to engage in a different activity, I would have written it that way.

My main characters also only engage in vaginal sex, and the heroine ends up pregnant. With this app, they are having anal sex and she ends up pregnant. WHAT? This App is a thousand steps backward.

The creators of this app pushed it a censoring bad words like the “f” word. But it does so much more than that. It changes the CONTENT of the work and that, I believe, violates an author’s copyright.

I empathize (which is like thighzerzing with EMPs) with the Clean Reader people, I really do. For several years part of my job was to build a contextual search and replace glossary for health content translations from scientific US English into consumer US and British English. I did this by hand (oh so many text variants) till I was blessedly handed–after many quarterly trips to the salt mines–a regular expressions kit for doing the same.

And I/we did a good job. So I assume that these language Fabrezists could do it, too. Since they aren’t I assume that there’s a quiet, nay spunky (oh yes, how will you come to replace that term without being as filthy minded as me, you wholesome people with the hole in the center) revolution taking place behind the scenes. Or surrounded by so much rugged yet moist diversity in genitalia and bodily fluids they’ve gone native or are simply bored and are having giggle contests.

Mom, I know what cat licking is but what’s rooster sucking? Mom, Hammy is running around the front yard yelling Freak My Jerk! That’s okay, right? Why did the elephant put a nose plug in its bottom? Mommy there’s smoke coming out of the Clean Reader!

As soon as a typical kid finds out she’s being censored, she’ll run with it. Or my daughter would work no help from her mother or me.

Okay, another point my publisher brought up that I’d forgotten about. A couple of years ago, there was a huge uproar when Apple decided nope, Kindle, Nook, Comixology, etc. couldn’t do in-app book purchases. My publisher has an app, and they couldn’t do in-app book purchases.

HOW THE FRAK is (was) the Clean Reader app, and that romance book app Page Foundry also puts out, doing in-app book purchases??? How are they getting around the system?

I only looked into this superficially, but it does seem like Clean Reader has its own library where the reader purchases books (meaning that Clean Reader becomes the retailer). I may have misunderstood, but that’s how it seems.

That means that Clean Reader would be SELLING altered content, not just altering content that had been previously purchased. As such: SUPER WRONG ON ALL THE LEVELS!

Again, I may have misread some stuff. I feel like without prior consent and a contract, Clean Reader shouldn’t even have access to these books, so really, I’m just super confused.

[…] Clean Reader critics speak out. Read Chuck Wendig’s take on the program here. Lilith Saintcrow details how to have your books taken out of the catalog (for authors.) And now, updates from Chuck Wendig at his Terrible Minds blog. […]

If anything, they’re just making it so that all sorts of objectionable material flies under their radar and into their kids brains.

There was an episode of the Brady Bunch where one of the kids decided Jesse James was his hero. Thinking to teach him the truth, the parents let him watch a movie about James. They’d seen the movie and knew that it showed James doing reprehensible things that their child would object to. Unfortunately, the moral guardians had censored the movie of all of James’ bad acts and the kid came out of it more convinced than ever before that Jesse James was a heroic figure.

Seems to me that same problem exists here. Take away the racial and misogynist slurs and other vile language that reveal a character to be morally reprehensible, and characters become cool who in the original are vile human beings, and no opportunity to talk about it, because they’ve removed the very words that create talking points and perspective on those characters. And what happens when they are idolizing these “cleaned” characters around others who have read the original? Are they not concerned with what others will think this reveals about their child’s values since others will assume the child read the unedited version? How will their children communicate with those who have read the same book but the content and context is fundamentally different? If they don’t want to talk to their children, how will they prepare their children for these conversations with their peers? What happens when the teacher freaks out over the child idolizing the character who is known to be a misogynist, racist, or otherwise vile person? How do they explain to the child that the words they took out revealed the character for who he really is? How do they explain that they altered the child’s hero and he isn’t really a hero, but they misled him?

They’ve even created a reality in which their children will idolize characters that have values that the author may think are okay, but that the parents object to. For example, changing sex to love. I’m assuming these people think a loving relationship is a monogomous one, but the app teaches otherwise. Which means that characters who sleep around instead of having “wholesome” relationships are portrayed as having feelings that they don’t have when they are fucking. What are they going to do when their child thinks that all sex is love? That using and discarding sexual partners is love? That promiscuity is love? Because they’d rather clean the book than talk about the fact that they believe in different values than some authors. If they’re just going to pass the book through an app and trust that that makes it “clean,” how will they have any sense of what the book is actually teaching their child?

Does anyone know someone with excellent hacking skills? It would be great to hack into the Clean Reader site and corrupt their app so it randomly replaces words like “if”, “the”, and “and” with “fuck”, “cunt”, and “douchebag.”

I keep thinking of “Bastard out of Carolina”. First off, the book becomes “Jerk out of Carolina”? I see a confused reader asking “Why did they stamp ‘jerk’ on her birth certificate?”

So the meaning of the work can definitely change. What’s ironic is that for a really erotic scene the word substitution actually wouldn’t change the meaning much (except for adding in extra anal sex), so what the frilly heck is the point? My guess is they’d rather not have such scenes at all, since they’re trying (ineffectively) to scrub them. I wonder if that’s the next step – censoring entire scenes from books?

This app makes some books incomprehensible, some inadvertently hilarious… no kidding authors are pissed. It really only makes sense for books with a handful of swearing in the dialogue. They should let authors (who would know how their book will be affected, and who have the best sense of whether the audience they would reach through this app is in any way a match) opt in, not force everyone to opt out.

[…] have heard of the Clean Reader app, and have formed our opinion. If you haven’t, Chuck Wendig has some examples of what the Clean Reader app does, Joanne Harris blasts the app for its lack of author consent (among other things), and Jonathon […]

[…] Clean Reader and that particular storm of controversy. Over at terribleminds, Chuck Wendig has a pretty good roundup of links and opinions. (Don’t miss out on his own thoughts on the matter, either.) The […]